Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/07035_Field_TCUM T600.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 917b | 16 lines

and publication, causing an entirely new attitude to the written
and printed word. Composing on the typewriter has altered the
forms of the language and of literature in ways best seen in the
later novels of Henry James that were dictated to Miss
Theodora Bosanquet, who took them down, not by shorthand,
but on a typewriter. Her memoir, Henry James at Work , should
have been followed by other studies of how the typewriter has
altered English verse and prose, and, indeed, the very mental
habits, themselves, of writers.

     With Henry James, the typewriter had become a
confirmed habit by 1907, and his new style developed a sort of
free, incantatory quality. His secretary tells of how he found
dictating not only easier but more inspiring than composing by
hand: “It all seems to be so much more effectively and
unceasingly pulled  out of me in speech than in writing,” he told